Is There Hope After Failure?

Carly here?:
Last review for the day!. my hands are aching and I'm all sleepy because it's 00:18am over here. so I'll use this one to check out. Okay, so here goes...

Is this an article? no
was it encouraging? most definitely yes!
did I like it? yeah.

okay, it was nice, and it felt like you was free styling . but this time not just in rap, but in essay writing. while I was reading, there's this tone I had in my head. it sounded like as though you was yelling at someone, because the person was trying to drag your soul down from believing you could make it again, even after you fall.

I'd rather advice, you go back, take a good look at your work, do a lot more than ranting in it and put those quotes and words that could drive a lazy man outta his seat, or self acclaimed failure to get back on his feet.

yes. i think there is always hope after failure. napoleon say every failure is a bridge for a victory.

Hey there AJloveswolf and welcome to YWS. I'm kinda glad people have started posting more variety in works recently because it was getting a little dry. It's just Lizzy dropping by as requested, so without a further ado, let the reviewing begin.

If we're speaking frankly, which I mostly am, the makeup of this work sounds more like an encouraging blog post than an article. And that is totally cool way to write something but at the moment it sounds very relaxed and way informal. It's actually more like a pep talk than anything else, which is something we all need sometime, but maybe not pasted together like this. The structure presses this point in even heavier as you're trying to talk to the audience to gain confidence from them. (Conflicting with the overall message of the piece.)

You've already had a lot of great reviews so let's see how many points I can hit without stepping on someone else.
I understand the question in the beginning but it took me a second look through to figure out what you were asking. You had it in the title and then talked about it further down, the spacing leading to some confusion. It would behoove you to restate the question from the title in conjunction with the opening line.
The shortness of the opening line, as well as the other parts, has a negative impact on your work. I found it rather annoying that as soon as your speech was starting to pick up, it would stop and change to a sort of new point. Best course of action here is to of course flesh it out.

The caps. The bold. The asterisks. Just ugh. Maybe try a method of showing emphasis without screaming in the reader's ear to constantly remember these very few things. The shortness of the work is just making it scream louder. Take that into consideration for draft 2.

The overall is that you've got a good baseline work and it could use some patching here and there. I like to chat with authors about the specifics, so if you want to hear them, drop me a line via pm.

Have a good and groovy #RevMo Tuesday.
~Liz

Hello, AJloveswolf! I'm here to review your work, as promised. I apologize in advance if my review isn't helpful.

As someone who considers herself to be an optimist, I loved the topic of your article! The idea of being hopeful after failure is something that I try to strive for, though, like you, I sometimes struggle with it. I think the message and your tone are were your strengths currently lie. The message is something that a reader can relate to, and your conversational voice lets you avoid sounding condescending. Your grammar is also on point! Those three things are great things to be good at.

The main problem I have with your work is how short it is. Your topic is one that you could really go into, and you have some good points that you could work off of. But right now, your article doesn't have enough meat to make it convincing, and your lack of evidence could make it hard to believe. If you get that covered, you should be good in terms of the arguments!

Another thing I would like to mention before I bring up one final point is the tone. As I mentioned earlier, it was very conversational and I loved it! It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the article seem more like you were giving a speech. I think you could either go in two directions from here. You could expand on it as an article, or develop it into a full-blown speech. Either one would work well!

We've all been there and it was painful, I must admit. Who hasn't, raises his hand, please.

Hi there! I'm here to leave a few thoughts about your piece.

So I think one part that you did excellently in this piece is establishing tone. Right from the beginning of the piece you had a humorous little opener with the raising of hands and continued the light tone throughout. For an essay piece like this, with a topic that's applicable to a wide audience, you had a good "attention getting" beginning and the casual tone helps keep readers from getting alienated or bored with the piece.

Now although your tone was excellent I think you could work a little more in two categories: 1) Evidence or Warranting your points and 2) Personalizing the Essay.

1) Evidence
Any good persuasive essay no matter if the subject is philosophy, science, life-skills, or politics is going to have Claims and Evidence. You've got the claim down: that there is hope after failure, so good job establishing a solid and clear thesis. But we're lacking a little bit on the evidence side of things. You give the readers three hypothetical examples (the skateboarder, the student, the mother) but you don't actually explain why they prove your point, or why they're true. Hypothetical examples are often not as convincing for this very reason, the audience can come up with a contradictory hypothetical example in their own heads. For example I could say, the skateboarder fell off his skateboard and it turns out he never was able to skateboard again. Because it's a hypothetical situation, it's just in the realm of the imagination rather than rooted in reality. Now if you were to take the example of a famous person like Tony Hawk or some other skateboard and tell an emotional narrative of where they fell and got back up or if you were to give a personal example of your own or even statistics this would give the examples weight because it would be rooted in reality.

You've got a good start with having a solid introduction and conclusion and very clear claim, I would suggest just spending a little bit more time explaining exactly how you've proven the claim that you made and giving evidence to back it.

Now on to the second point
2) Personality
One of my close relatives is actually a motivational speaker as his main source of income, no joke. And something I've learned from listening to him and to other "motivational speakers" that one runs into now and again, is that one of their main stumbling blocks is sounding cliche or non-sincere. Often motivational speaking is just so overly optimistic or so imaginative and not rooted in reality that it's hard for a reader to connect with them. They end up sounding hollow when they intended to sound sincere. Now this doesn't happen all the time, but it often does. One of the things that can be done to circumvent this is to get out of the cliche patterns. Make your piece unique. And put yourself into your speech or piece. If you tell the reader how you personally connect with the advice you're giving, how it's helped you, how you've overcome failure, how this applies to your life, then it makes the claims personal and gives them personality. When you put you in your claims, especially when it's a motivational sort of speech then people can't argue with your experience and I think it makes the piece sound more sincere.

Overall, you did an excellent job editing this piece for grammar and honestly the piece was so friendly and enthusiastic you sound like a really cool person to know. I think there is a little room here and there for improvement. Nice job and congratulations on posting your first piece on YWS, I hope to read more of your work in the future.

~alliyah

Hello, AJloveswolf, PastelSlushie here for review number six for #RevMo ! Let's get right into it! Also, welcome to YWS! It's great to see you've already posted something. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask!

The first thing I would like to point out is the genre this falls under. This doesn't really fit into the category Article/Essay very much, as you said in this story's description asking if this was a good article (I think that's what it said? I'm too lazy to check back, you're gonna have to fill my gaps here, lol) This fits more in the category of... huh... other? I don't know, I've never read something like this before, hah!

The topic of hope after failing is nice, however, in the first paragraph, I feel a certain topic is being repeated. I feel the "put your hand down" thing you have going on in the beginning part of this is a bit repeated, and, for me, making it seem a tiny bit unnecessary. And as well in the first sentence:

"We've all been there and it was painful, I must admit. Who hasn't, raises his hand, please."

This sentence starts off a bit confusing, again, for me, because I don't know what is painful and what everyone has gone through. In fact, what we're reading about isn't stated until:

"So, the question is: Is there hope after failure?"

While the title of this points out what I'm going to be reading, I still wanted to point that out.

Feel free to send me a message if you have any questions or disagree with anything in my review. Best of luck in your future pieces,

Pastel

Hi there AJloveswolf. This is Kays here dropping in for a review on this early Monday evening. I don't often catch articles or essays floating around in the Green Room so I like to catch them while I can and that's what I'm doing here! Without further ado, let's review.

The beginning of the essay is confusing. I'm going to assume that the raising of hands is for those who haven't faced failure--I find this to be hardly true that seventy-seven people don't believe that they've experienced failure before. I see that the beginning and the rest of the essay or article isn't in that format or structure either. What I mean by this is the fact that this is formed in more of the shape of a lecture or a teaching to a class that's spoken orally instead of on the page.

That's my first main problem here--is this supposed to be written in that sense? I see this working better as a lecture taught and this generally shows how the lecture goes. The idea that there's hope after failure is noble although I have to say that this doesn't do the best job at driving the theme home.

There are a few examples given throughout and while those are nice this essay happens to end up being a little short which is unfortunate because there's more detail that we're able to delve into. This also goes along with the essay not having a lot of structure and lacking an opening and conclusion as well as a body--an irregular shape is taken and there isn't a lot of substance or content to go off of. Another main problem is...this is mostly based off of pathos without ethos or logos. There's not ethics or logic here but there is emotion or opinion that takes over the article.

Are there any facts to prove your case? The word choice used is also able to be strengthened with a larger vocabulary and there are a few grammar errors able to be fixed throughout. The concept is well but the execution can use polish--keep working on this because I can see potential for this being even stronger with the themes if there's logic applied and the rest worked in from there to make this case being made harder hitting.

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask! I hope I helped and have a great day.

Hey! Chitz here for a review.

Well,coming to the topic,"Is there hope after failure?", is really a good choice. Its applicable to the people of all age groups, who find themselves in a similar situation.

On to your article, I feel that there can be better use of words. You have simply repeated the sentence having the meaning "put your hands down". Also, you have made use of many paragraphs which were not required to be separated in that manner. You can simply state the examples, like that of skateboarder, a student and a divorced mother in one para in continuation and at the last state that "the answer to all these questions is YES." This would have a better and strong effect on the readers.

As to sum up, your overall content was relevant and quite inspiring. Do work on your writing skills.

Looking forward for more articles from you.